About Us (cont'd)

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While this was going on at the application level, there was something else interesting afoot at the infrastructure level of information technology. Little-noticed by the big incumbent vendors, a phenomenon known as open source software was starting to come into its own. The practice of programmers around the world, collaboratively developing software over the Internet, seemed to many a hobby without any real business application.

But the open source community, which numbered in the tens of thousands, worked tirelessly to improve the core operating systems, databases, and servers that powered much of the Internet. These building block software components quickly caught up with, and in many cases surpassed, their counterparts in the world of proprietary software.

New features were added faster, and quality-tested by thousands of real-world users. Bugs were identified and fixed more quickly, and with an openness and candor that even the most traditional IT managers found refreshing. Security improved dramatically, as vulnerabilities that had previously been locked up in proprietary compiled code were exposed to the antiseptic sunlight of open source development. In one well-publicized case, a major database software vendor actually had an embarrassing "back door" security hole fixed by an independent developer within weeks of releasing its product as open source – and this software had been powering customers in the military, banking, and other sensitive industries for years!

The founders of the company that would become xTuple saw a compelling opportunity to build a new solution for small manufacturers – based on open standards which would give growing companies the flexibility they needed. On the technological side, that meant leveraging all the work on robust open source building blocks such as the Linux operating system, the PostgreSQL database, and the Qt framework for C++.

But the desire for open standards also extended to the business logic of the software. Manufacturing concepts such as MRP and MRP-II had been around for years, and had been rigorously codified by organizations such as APICS. But a surprising number of programs – even the more expensive ones – went their own way, forcing users to change their business processes to accommodate the software. That struck us as fundamentally backwards – the software should be open, based on standard professional methodologies, but with the flexibility to accommodate the individual characteristics of particular vertical manufacturing industries. What would you call such a thing? Open Manufacturing.

So we started writing code. Lots of it. And we started a company.

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